Posts Tagged ‘Save Mart’

Here’s something for your Bucket List – you and your buds should spend 40 minutes to journey on up to the InfineonRaceway in bucolic Sonoma County for the annual NASCAR Sprint CupToyota/Save Mart 350. I’ll tell you, never before have I seen such a collection of military jets, helicopters, U.S. Air Force generals, U.S. Army howitzers, skydivers, 18-wheelers, RV’s, motorcycles, fun, attractive, we’re-happy-to-be-here groups of women, affable dirtbags drinking beer, and loud, loud, loud race cars all in one place in the bay area.

It’s like you cross over the Petaluma and enter into a different world.

Who goes to this annual event? People like actor Tom Cruise, 49er Roger Craig, Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, and a host of local celebrities too numerous to mention. And yet, this event doesn’t seem to get all that much attention from the press in the 415. That’s funny.

Anyway, why not let’s take a look-see.

The custom exhaust headers on this cow should tell you that this part of Sonoma County isn’t the regular kind of Wine Country that you know and love:

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If you want to go to the bay area wine country on Race Day, plan on leaving your house by 7:30 AM. There’ll be traffic up there, but it will be well-managed. (I’ve never experienced them, but I understand that the traffic jams are no picnic. Oh well, you just need to plan a bit and you’ll be fine.)

The mise-en-scenefrom Sunday Raceday 2010. There’s a huge facility down there big enough to have resident deer living inside(!) the racetrack:

The logistics of this traveling road show are amazing:

Now, speaking of fun and attractive, a NASCAR Regional Manager named Krystal managed to finagle me a garage-and-pits pass, which lets you see a beehive of activity up close, not that I knew what was going on. But these teens seemed to know the score – they certainly were happy to be at the garage when noisy #88 fired up for the first time on race day anyway:

Red Bull was in the house. (One hit from this contraption is probably three or four cans’ worth.)

O.K. that’s the garage. Now, let’s go out to the track where this friendly middle-aged fellow was offering people rides in his front-wheel-drive Camry hybrid:

“Celebrate Father’s Day in the Wine County at the Toyota/Save Mart 350 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series weekend, June 18-20. Why give dad a necktie when you can give him the gift of Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart swapping paint on the twisting road course.”

These NASCAR posters on sale for the giveaway price of $.25 aren’t exactly blowing out the doors of our Lucky Stores. (Pepsi must think that San Francisco is just another town on the NASCAR circuit.)

So let’s see here, San Francsico’s “new” Lucky started off a few years back with red and white shopping bags (oh no! Ed Jew! – yes, he was there that day, along with the undercover Federales who were stalking him at the time) that fell apart easily, then, I don’t know, they had paper bags, then paper bags with handles, then paper bags without handles recently, and now this:

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They’re free. They’re built to last. They have a Halloween theme. What more could you ask for?

How about a commercial for “Got Your Bags?” These bags also have that.

You know me, I’m a firestarter, a twisted firestarter, so I like the convenience of having a ready supply of paper bags to use as accelerants when I’m arsoning parked cars. But if this is the future of shopping bags, I can live with it.

These things should last a long time and be very easy to pack up for reuse.

So, hurray for the new bags, I guess. At least they don’t fall apart with a quickness the way the older plastic bags did.